This is a revision of a proposal to examine how the fertility-related behaviors of women in the U.S. are affected by the characteristics of communities in which they reside. The proposed study extends the investigators' recently completed study by conducting a series of analyses designed to investigate the hypothesized effects of a full range of contextual factors on the fertility decision-making process. This will be accomplished by incorporating our previously developed conceptualization of how community properties affect reproductive behavior into the integrative framework presented by Bulatao and Lee, where reproductive behavior is organized into the components of the supply of children, demand for children, fertility regulation, and a set of specific fertility outcomes. The analysis of six behaviors contained within these components will employ the contextual database developed during our earlier project. The database links aggregate-level data to the records of respondents in the NSF-III and was specifically designed for a contextual analysis of reproductive behavior. In accomplishing its overall objective, the proposed study will address a number of important issues. First, we will test hypotheses relating to whether specific community characteristics differ in their importance in accounting for the various fertility-related behaviors. Second, we will examine the total effects of contextual factors by modeling: 1) their hypothesized direct and indirect effects (as mediated by individual-level attributes of the respondent) in an additive combination; and 2) their effects as conditioned by individual-level characteristics in a multiplicative or interactive fashion. Third, we will test hypotheses regarding the differential effects of specific community characteristics on a given reproductive outcome according to a woman's race and marital status. Fourth our proposed research explicitly recognizes that """"""""context"""""""" can be defined at multiple levels; accordingly, this study will be a multilevel contextual analysis in which the operation of community properties is examined when they arc measured at their theoretically appropriate levels. The investigation of these issues for each of the fertility-related outcomes contained within an integrative framework of reproductive behavior will provide the first comprehensive study of the effects of contextual factors on a woman's childbearing in the U.S.
